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No more rules Tuesday October 9, 2007, 8 comments

There was a time when the 9rules leaf was considered a badge of merit – a symbol of quality – and I was quite proud to have it on my site.

But the focus of the 9rules site has changed considerably from those beginnings, and a new user agreement has made me question the value of continued involvement with the network.

This site is no longer a member of 9rules.

A Rain of Frogs will continue as it always has, so please keep on reading. The energy that the 9rules network would like its members to expend on the community will be directed to making this a better place to read.

To all my 9rules readers, and the 9rules leaders I wish the best of luck.

To those who continue to read, thank you. You are the lifeblood of A Rain of Frogs.

Comments

It’s not a matter of deserve or not. It became apparent once the “Triad” (do they know who the Triad really are?) made it a requirement to participate in either the public or private community sections of the site that their goals and mine had diverged.

The way I saw it, I provided my content to the 9rules homepage, provided what I hoped and believed was quality content to the network, and in return I received a boost to my traffic.

Instead traffic from 9rules was pretty limited, and now in addition to my writing and posts they require my participation on their forum site.

I’ve watched so many community sites die this way. They get big by doing something good, then decide that they have something that can be monetized. And that’s cool. After all, what better thing to do than make money doing something you love?

And then they realize they need more money to do the things they want to do with their labour of love. So they add features.

And when those features don’t quite drive the traffic and revenue they were hoping, they start changing their Terms of Service to push people to those new features.

And it cycles downward from there.

I consider myself an expert in the operation of the “community” aspect of any community site – I was once one of the most known people on the once-upon-a-time largest Macintosh community on the net – and I don’t see good things in the 9rules future.

I don’t like 9rules anymore. I was an avid reader of the site and participated in their communities, until someone decided to ban me from participating due to one-liner subjects. It’s stupid, and that’s how they’ll loose their “fan base”.

You’re not the first to choose this response. I haven’t really checked the issue from their angle, but I know that (a) it’s not quite the site it used to be and (b) 9rules is very noisy anymore.

They could stand to streamline, and maybe this was part of an effort to that end: cull the herd by dividing those willing to do more from those unwilling to do more. I’ll still go there periodically, but typically only to find sites I’ve liked infrequently than to find anything new.

I’m leaning in the same direction. I haven’t been participating over there, and to think I could add that to my already overflowing list of virtual community building seems a bit unrealistic.

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The website of Adrian Lebar

A Rain of Frogs is written, designed and built by Adrian Lebar, a twenty(!) year veteran of web design and development. He is currently managing web and mobile development teams at Canada’s largest and most beloved classifieds site, Kijiji!